Quirk (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pastwatcher) wrote2010-04-12 03:10 am
pastwatcher) wrote2010-04-12 03:10 am
GSTGC
I just went to the Graduate Student Topology and Geometry Conference. It was fun!
There, I:
*saw![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mikevonkorff, Kevin C., and a couple of others in their department, and Miles Vorkosigan (by which I mean that I now am borrowing a copy of a book I haven't read)
*saw Corrin (pronounced Corinne), whom I know through Columbia viasilkspinner, and some of us had dinner with her. She is apparently watering silkspinner's plant, and generally having a good time at Columbia.
*saw Diana D. and George T. from the 2007 summer program I did. George also knows Ed and Toly, and apparently Toly understands some infinitely abstract crazy stuff.
*found that Nisan now has temporarily blue hair, which is awesome.
*learned what a diffeological space was
*heard things about hyperbolic 3-manifolds, so now I kind of know what those should be and the bit about S^1 fibration actually might make sense, though I haven't yet bothered to learn any of this outside of going to talks.
*saw a bit about Khovanov homology again, in a pretty good talk about how one categorifies some invariants (e.g. Euler characteristic) to get kinds of homology
*heard a talk from a professor who worked withultrawaffle's advisor *and* his pseudo-advisor to demonstrate that Arf invariants are 0 above index 2^8-2. This is about higher stable homotopy groups of spheres, so I imagine it is pretty groundbreaking stuff for homotopy theorists.
*learned about the 4-genus of a knot
*saw a couple of things about how knot manipulations and surgery are bordisms; have yet to convince myself of this entirely
*was sleepy too often, unfortunately
Apparently I am friendly for a mathematician; since I had a few people I knew there, I introduced many of them to each other, and since they are all cool people, they enjoyed this and were willing to hang out. I only met 2 or 3 new people myself long enough to stick, though. There were actually 7 of us there from Stanford (4 first-years), and I think we should encourage first-years to go next year; possibly I will even go next year. The format of three main lectures and several half-hour sessions of four talks per session actually worked very well. One talk was always algebraic topology, one low-dimensional topology/knot theory, one geometric group theory (Kevin C. does this stuff now, 'tis crazy) and one misfits.
Finally, on the plane back, I read enough of "From Calculus to Cohomology" to realize why I'd been stupidly confused about tangent-space notation, so soon I think I can get Lie derivatives. Then I will stop worrying about Differential Geometry. But it's kind of crazy how much differential geometry&topology I am setting out to learn this quarter.
There, I:
*saw
mikevonkorff, Kevin C., and a couple of others in their department, and Miles Vorkosigan (by which I mean that I now am borrowing a copy of a book I haven't read)*saw Corrin (pronounced Corinne), whom I know through Columbia via
silkspinner, and some of us had dinner with her. She is apparently watering silkspinner's plant, and generally having a good time at Columbia.*saw Diana D. and George T. from the 2007 summer program I did. George also knows Ed and Toly, and apparently Toly understands some infinitely abstract crazy stuff.
*found that Nisan now has temporarily blue hair, which is awesome.
*learned what a diffeological space was
*heard things about hyperbolic 3-manifolds, so now I kind of know what those should be and the bit about S^1 fibration actually might make sense, though I haven't yet bothered to learn any of this outside of going to talks.
*saw a bit about Khovanov homology again, in a pretty good talk about how one categorifies some invariants (e.g. Euler characteristic) to get kinds of homology
*heard a talk from a professor who worked with
ultrawaffle's advisor *and* his pseudo-advisor to demonstrate that Arf invariants are 0 above index 2^8-2. This is about higher stable homotopy groups of spheres, so I imagine it is pretty groundbreaking stuff for homotopy theorists.*learned about the 4-genus of a knot
*saw a couple of things about how knot manipulations and surgery are bordisms; have yet to convince myself of this entirely
*was sleepy too often, unfortunately
Apparently I am friendly for a mathematician; since I had a few people I knew there, I introduced many of them to each other, and since they are all cool people, they enjoyed this and were willing to hang out. I only met 2 or 3 new people myself long enough to stick, though. There were actually 7 of us there from Stanford (4 first-years), and I think we should encourage first-years to go next year; possibly I will even go next year. The format of three main lectures and several half-hour sessions of four talks per session actually worked very well. One talk was always algebraic topology, one low-dimensional topology/knot theory, one geometric group theory (Kevin C. does this stuff now, 'tis crazy) and one misfits.
Finally, on the plane back, I read enough of "From Calculus to Cohomology" to realize why I'd been stupidly confused about tangent-space notation, so soon I think I can get Lie derivatives. Then I will stop worrying about Differential Geometry. But it's kind of crazy how much differential geometry&topology I am setting out to learn this quarter.